Jonah, your correspondent cites Timothy Garton Ash’s current line on the Big Issue:

If we are calm, clear-sighted and resolute, we will eventually win this struggle and remain free. A continent that has rid itself of the horrors of imperialism, fascism and communism will see off this lesser menace too. But it will take many years, and we had better shape up to it.

Here’s what he had to say about it a couple of years back:

The populations of Europe are aging fast, so more immigrants will be needed to support the pensioners, and these will largely be Muslim immigrants. For this increasingly Muslim Europe to define itself against Islam would be ridiculous and suicidal… Let’s imagine, for a moment, Europe in 2025 at its possible best. A political, economic, and security community of some forty free countries and 650 million people, embracing all the lands in which the two world wars began, and producing, still, a large part of the wealth of the world. A further 650 million people, born in the most explosive parts of the early twenty-first-century globe, but now living in a great arc of partnership with this European Union, from Marrakesh, via Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tbilisi, all the way to Vladivostok. That would not be nothing.

That’s the crux of the matter for the many members of the European intellectual class who take the Garton Ash persuasion: If you believe in the inevitability of a Euro-Muslim “arc of partnership” (actually, “crescent of embrace” has quite a ring to it), figuring out where to draw the line – active jihadists, ideological supporters, pro-sharia imams – gets rather problematic. Still, at least these days he acknowledges there is a problem, which is more than he did a few years ago.